From the Empirical Archives: A Review of Tenzin Norbu's "Ocean of Compassion"

A Review of Tenzin Norbu's "Ocean of Compassion"

Tim Gannon

Originally published in the January 2013 issue of Empirical

The ocean is complex and so is the Ocean of Compassion. It is complex because the simple parts go together in a surprising way. Ocean of Compassion breaks into three interrelated parts. The Introduction is extensive, and it itself falls into three parts. The second is the poetic expression of progression in the virtues to reach the Bodhisattva state. The final part continues in poetic style to present how the foolishness of philosophy since Kant is overcome by love.

The whole book, but especially the chapters on progression in virtue, is intended to appeal to individuals of every religious and spiritual persuasion. It mostly succeeds at this. The traditional Eastern references to rebirth and reincarnation are not essential to spiritual progress and can be ignored by those who do not believe in reincarnation. The progress in virtues is the key to a good and happy life and serves all who aspire to it. This progression also leads to the Bodhisattva state–the state that desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings.

The introduction previews the whole project. Tenzin Norbu lays out the origin and goal of the book. The poetry rose from his need for images that will inspire him on the spiritual path and the book is to help all others who wish to attain enlightenment and end the separation between the perceived small self and the ground of all being. He points out the similarity of the path of virtue between all religious traditions.

Three items in the introduction are noteworthy. Tenzin mentions analytic meditation and placement meditation as the two main types of meditation to utilize with the passages. His treatment of these two meditations is sketchy in the introduction but in his blog talk radio presentations (http://www.blogtalkradio. com/the-life-of universal-loving), he clarifies each type of meditation and does guided meditations on each. A passage from Ocean of Compassion is used for each guided meditation. Also, Tenzin frequently has guest musicians on each show that are on various spiritual paths. The congruence of their spiritual experience of the virtues and the ground of being reinforces Tenzin’s insight into the unity of spiritual truths.

These are interesting and entertaining interviews.

The third item in the introduction is more of interest to philosophers, but the presentation is useful to anyone who has puzzled over reconciliation between relative and absolute truth. Many people float in a frustrating morass of relativism. There is a yearning for absolute truth. Tenzin’s approach is a useful reconciliation of the concern that everything is changing and the desire for an absolute.

The poetic chapters on the virtues and progression in the virtues are very practical. They bring the truths of Shanti Deva’s (8th century CE) Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life into the 21st-century Western mind. As humans become what they think, these verses are worthy of memorization and meditation. They progress from the desire to become a Bodhisattva to arrival at the state of Bodhisattva equanimity.

These passages are also well adapted to passage meditation, a form of meditation made popular in the United States by Eknath Easwaran, a meditation teacher who moved from India to the United States in 1959 and taught the first accredited course on meditation at UC Berkeley.

Passage meditation exists in many religious traditions and Sri Easwaran’s followers keep it alive on line at eknatheaswaran.org. Passage meditation is a practice of sitting quietly with the eyes closed while reciting a passage of spiritual import as slowly as possible while keeping the flow of the passage intelligible. It develops great concentration.

The entire poetic text of the Ocean of Compassion is well suited to this type of meditation.

Also the progression in virtue in the chapters is natural. Moving through the chapters, one first raises Bodhichitta. Pema Chodron is very delightful as she begins each dharma talk asking the student to first raise Bodhichitta in preparation to receive teaching. Then one raises effort, the desire to walk the path. Here again Pema has a pithy injunction that the desire to walk the path is an important step on the path. As desire and joyful effort are raised, one is prepared to the openness of heart, generosity toward oneself and others. With heart opening comes patience. In this context patience is the critical virtue that overcomes anger and anxiety. As this time in the world is extremely anxious and angry, this virtue is the key first to our own peace and the peace of all around us. It is a virtue that continues the growth of Love in us. Love is the desire for the good of the other as the other. It is also the desire to end the suffering of all sentient beings.

Moral discipline is a frightening virtue and a frightening idea. Patience moves the spiritual aspirant to undertake it. One usually thinks of discipline as something imposed from without. This is a virtue imposed from within. Discipline implies pain. One is prepared for the internal pain of moral discipline by the pain endured by the practice of patience. It is not easy to turn the other cheek. Remaining patient while enduring anger and anxiety prepares the self to embrace moral discipline. It prepares us to grow in Love. As patience is a response to acts, moral discipline is a response to, and guarding of, thoughts.

Buddhism has the best understanding of how the mind works. It has identified all the tricks of the mind. This section on moral discipline goes through the trick set in three manifestations. Each phase of mental treachery manifests as pain or suffering. Each suffering is a hell. Reflections on the hells created in the mind are motivation to heal the mind. The hells of the mind are Jungian. The subconscious creates and contains every horror. Each horror manifest in life. The poetic images of hell are motivation to seek remedy. The images are the stuff of “Fire and Brimstone” sermons. The poetry suggests a skillful response to each suffering to experience peace. Perfection of moral discipline leads to the virtue of concentration.

Concentration is the ability to hold the mind on one thing. This is very difficult. (Except if you are watching British TV drama.) Practice of both analytic and placement meditation improve concentration. Also memorization and recitation of the passages improves concentration. These skillful means prepare the mind to see wisdom, the ultimate virtue. One who dwells in wisdom is a bodhisattva. The ultimate wisdom is love, a dwelling in the ocean of compassion.

Many statements in each chapter inspire the careful reader or daily reciter to seek more information. For example, when practicing concentration, one seeks to develop nine altitudes of mental repose. Careful study is needed to determine what these altitudes are, and how to place the mind to arrive at “Placement in equipoise.” Progress on the path brings up a subject to study within in both placement and analytic meditation and without by scholarly investigation.

There are many opportunities for study and reflection in these chapters. Perfection in wisdom is clarity of seeing. The reflection and meditation stated in the previous paragraph is required in every line to see and experience truth in the mind and in life. Wisdom and the chapter on wisdom are very challenging. The transition from statements about the mind and the outside world to the Ella-Guardian story is abrupt.

It is an amusing story that continues mental events and words and the world in another genre. The statements and dialogue in the story ask for the same serious consideration as the earlier poetry. The story raises the question, “What is going on here?” The Ella-Guardian story is an example of philosophical silly talk about truth, persons, and life. It’s amusing to imagine Immanuel Kant reincarnated as a disoriented young woman. Unfortunately, despite the disorientation and other humorous events, Ella is committed to the Kantian view.

There just are noumenal and phenomenal persons. The world views of Annette Baier and Richard Rorty are introduced. They both maintain that only relative or conventional/contextual truth exists. Universal absolute truth is a wishful figment. Persons are only relative contexts. The Guardian argues poetically that there are two truths, one relative the other absolute. The argument is interesting. It gives a useful context for recognizing that absolute truth is possible and what it looks like. Ella experiences absolute truth in the compassionate love of the mother.

Life is complicated and lived one simple moment at a time. This is Tenzin Norbu putting life together. He served as a United States Air Force Officer (Navigator) and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the USAF Academy at Colorado Springs. After his retirement from the Air Force he continued to teach philosophy in Colorado Springs. Frustrated by the lack of certitude in philosophy, he studied and taught the religions of the world. He was attracted to Buddhism and is currently a dedicated practitioner who seeks to end the suffering of all. Oddly enough as his meditation practice deepened, his philosophical views became clearer and compassionate. Ocean of Compassion is his first published effort to make the Bodhisattva path easily available to all.

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From the Empirical Archives: A Review of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette?"

A review of Maria Semple’s novel "Where’d you go, Bernadette"

Carrie Wasinger

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

“On or about December, 1910, human character changed forever. I’m not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless. . . .” ~Virginia Woolf, from Mr. and Mrs. Brown

Virginia Woolf was a clever lady. If in post-WWI London she could discern, with such a careful eye, the subtle shifts of attitude that heralded modernity, one can only imagine what she’d see if she looked at us now, still stumbling through the early years of an adolescent century. Would she see a world beguiled with its own technology? A culture adrift on a digital cloud? No doubt. But I suspect she would see more, too, would penetrate the hard shell of digital hardware and notice that, fundamentally, what has changed is the nature of genius.

And like Maria Semple, she might very well blame Seattle. Maria Semple is no stranger to comedy. Her television writing credits include the well-received Mad About You and Ellen, and the critical darling Arrested Development. A thematic compatriot of all three, Where’d You Go, Bernadette exhibits the same sort of quirky and irreverent but ultimately endearing humor. Nevertheless, Bernadette has some bigger fish to fry than does the typical really smart people cope with a world that’s big enough for McMansions and MMORPGs, but too small for real creativity.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette takes us straight into the Emerald City, from the pretentious Queen Anne Hill, where under the immense weight of conventionality “you will want to live only in a Craftsman,”to the campus of “Big Brother”–aka Microsoft–that mecca of innovation, where designers are “swallowed whole” and top-secret projects are known only by their annoying fem-bot nicknames. There, we meet a family of extraordinaires: Elgin Branch, Microsoft VP and inventor; Bernadette Fox, ground-breaking architect and former MacArthur Award recipient; and their daughter, Bee, whose particular brand of genius comes in the form of having survived six open-heart surgeries before the age of five.

As now 14-year-old Bee reminds us early on, genius is a dogged, persistent beast in the modern world: “I’m totally fine now, and have been for nine and a half years. Just take a time-out and ponder that. For twothirds of my life I’ve been totally normal.”

“Normal” is difficult to achieve in Bee’s Seattle, where children who attend private schools dedicated to “compassion, academics, and global connectitude” can only sink so far toward mediocrity as to earn a grade of “W”–“working toward excellence.” Bee is perfectly happy to have her genius put on hold, or even forgotten.

As another, more nuanced example of genius put on hold, Semple offers up Bernadette, Bee’s brilliant but anti-social mother. Bernadette’s architectural career took a sudden and shocking turn that must wait half the novel to be explained, so she has followed her husband to Seattle where she spends the bulk of her time shut away in an old trailer conversing with a virtual assistant in India while he’s wowing the world and YouTube, Sir Ken Robinsonstyle, with the fourth-most-watched TED talk ever. When Bernadette does emerge into the sun (and there’s not that much of that in Seattle) she never fails to annoy her overly energetic neighbor, Audrey Griffin, by refusing to participate in the PTA.

When events transpire leading to Bernadette’s mysterious disappearance, Bee goes on a hunt to find her mother, a hunt that takes her, literally, to the ends of the earth. At the core of the novel’s satire lies the antagonism between Bernadette and Audrey, which Semple plays for a number of good laughs (the most amusing of which involves an unfortunate incident with some blackberry bushes, a roomful of kindergartners, and a mudslide). To Bernadette, Audrey represents all there is to hate about Seattle suburban life, and to Audrey, Bernadette is the epitome of privileged self-indulgence. 

Despite occasional moments of touching humor, this tired competing neighbors routine is far too clichéd to transcend slapstick and approach real parody. It just never seems to climb beyond cuteness, and is obviously going to be unraveled in some twist-y way at an opportune moment in the plot.

Semple far more deftly wades into Bill Gates country, taking a knife to the now iconic images and myths that mark our culture of digital innovation. It’s about time someone had the courage to mock TED, the conference that makes innovation synonymous with standing on stage talking smart and funny for all of twenty minutes, preferably with a few electronic gadgets taped to one’s body. Thus amid all the cute humor, the novel raises an important question that betrays, as Ms. Woolf might say, the shift in human character: do our innovations make people extraordinary, or is it merely the representation of the novelty, the viral nature of the rhetoric, that seems to define genius?

To that end, the novel is presented as a series of documents–emails, notes, records, letters, newspaper articles, medical reports–collected by Bee and assembled, presumably, as a means of investigating her mother’s disappearance (although we later find out there’s more to this collection than meets the eye). These fragments of the characters’ digital selves seem to have a life of their own, and in them the characters often grow to almost absurd proportions. It’s no wonder Bee would rather not be known as the little girl who should have died; it’s hard to live when you’re constantly competing with your own genius.

That said, the novel never really lets its genius characters off the hook. Their antisocial behavior, escapist tendencies, and refusal to play with the lesser beings of the neighborhood (i.e. the rest of us) are fun to watch and to sympathize with–which of us hasn’t smirked at the sycophantic admin’s groupee-lust for the boss? but it can’t last forever, at least not without imploding. The single greatest line of the novel is a one-sentence treatise on the artistic temperament: “people like you must create. If you don’t create […] you’ll become a menace to society.”

At the end of every comedy, there’s a return to normalcy following the chaos that has ensued. Relationships are reestablished and renewed. In the novel, Bernadette is eventually found, and her genius put back to work. Bee is allowed to actually be “normal.” But Semple leaves a few loose threads still drifting out there in the wind in a way that tends to make the story feel incomplete, as if this were a sitcom that was unceremoniously canceled.

Where’d You Go Bernadette is a delightful book, but you’re not likely to close the back cover and think it the most significant novel you read this year. Its textual life may be rather short, however. The movie rights have been optioned, and early reports suggest a 2015 release. I suspect it will make an even more delightful film, so I’m eagerly waiting the day I can go in search of Bernadette all over again.

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From the Empirical Archives: A Review of "Steplings"

A Review of Steplings

Carrie Wasinger

Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Empirical

The tradition of the quest is a long and laurelled one. Joining narratives as disparate as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the image of the journey is ubiquitous in western culture. We find it in song (“The Long and Winding Road”), folk tale (“Little Red Riding Hood”), and film (Stand By Me), in fine art and in pop culture. The journey is one of our most symbolic ways of describing the evolution of character, so it’s not surprising that we turn to tropes of travel when we describe the formative moments of youth. Teens “go off ” to college; middle age brings us nostalgic visions of that magical road trip taken in our twenties.

Book Review: The Virgin Journals by Travis Laurence Naught

Review of The Virgin Journals by Travis Laurence Naught

Travis Laurence Naught first caught my attention because he submitted poetry to Empirical. His work has appeared in the November 2012 issue, the January 2013 issue, which are also available in the Best of Empirical 2012. We are pleased to be publishing more of his poetry later in 2013.

From the Empirical Archives: Swamplandia!

Swamplandia! A review of Karen Russell’s new novel Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011)

Carrie Wasinger

PHOTO: Daniel Oines

The economy must be improving. The kiosks near the registers of my local Barnes and Noble are once again resplendent with useless do-dads designed to sit on a desk and look pretty. During a recent visit, I lost twenty valuable minutes to those dastardly kiosks, mesmerized by a small set of scented candles, lined up in a row, each a different color, each author-themed.

From the Empirical Archives: A Review of Death Comes to Pemberley by Carrie Wasinger

A Review of Death Comes to Pemberley: A Novel (Knopf 2011) By P.D. James

Carrie Wasinger

"Chatsworth House"
PHOTO: David Ooms

Originally Published in the June 2012 Issue of Empirical

The literary body is suffering from Jane Austen reflux. Pride and Prejudice just keeps coming back to us, in ever more caustic  forms. Journey to your local Barnes and Noble, and you will find yourself in the land of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Mr. Darcy’s Bite having passed through the forgettable villages of A Wife for Mr. Darcy and Mr. Darcy’s Undoing along the way.

What accounts for this contemporary fascination with a narrative that’s nearly two hundred years old? The ladies of the nation’s book clubs may answer as one, like a Greek chorus: “The epic romance speaks to the very marrow of the modern woman! Darcy is our ideal husband, a hero unknown among modern men!” Well ladies, first, I suggest you cut back on the chardonnay. Then, I ask: have you read Austen? Because epic, she is not. Romantic? Not even.

Austen’s novels are finely-wrought, sophisticated acts of rhetorical prowess that peek into the complexities of a social moment that we post-moderns cannot hope to know because it no longer exists. To put it simply, hers was a society built, very carefully, on character. To read Austen for the ebb and swell of romance is to mistake Simon and Garfunkle for Green Day.

As a much-needed antidote to Austen reflux, acclaimed mystery novelist P.D. James brings us Death Comes to Pemberley, the latest in the string of novels to fantasize about the post-nuptial events of Pride and Prejudice. Kicking the salivary glands of both Austen and James devotees into high gear, the novel attempts to marry two of the more antithetical impulses of fiction: the gritty, darkened world of criminal misdeeds and the carefully ordered rhetorical discretion of Georgian England. Death Comes to Pemberley sets out to remind us that the world of Pride and Prejudice (zombies notwithstanding) values reason and prudence above all else. All the beloved characters from the original are brought back to teach us that we should value reason and prudence, too.

The novel opens a handful of years after the events of Pride and Prejudice. On the eve of the annual Pemberley ball, a coach madly races through the estate’s woodland to deposit the estranged Lydia Wickham on the doorstep of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, her sister and brother-in-law, where she hysterically announces that her husband is dead. Darcy and his male guests tromp off into the night to investigate, only to discover Wickham, fully alive, leaning over the corpse of the Wickhams’ close friend, Captain Denny. The only thing more distasteful to Darcy than having the Wickhams on his hands again is the possibility that Wickham may be convicted of murder, which would entail scandal on all present and future generations of Darcys. To his credit, however, Darcy cannot bring himself to believe in Wickham’s guilt and sets out to ensure that justice be done.

PHOTO: Herry Lawford

From the first page, the reader of Death Comes to Pemberley can’t help but admire the adroitness with which James has adopted Austen’s prose style. James’s sentences, like Austen’s, unwind stealthily, with the pacing and phrasing that promise a satisfying bite of sarcasm at the end. But mere imitation is not James’s intent. In contemporary mysteries, forensic science often takes point in solving the crime. Death Comes to Pemberley takes place in a time before blood-typing and ballistics. The trial of Wickham, which occupies the last third of the novel, must therefore turn on evidence of character, not science. What is said about a person, what a person says about themselves, what is deliberately not said—these all conspire to create character, good or bad. The novelist’s job of drawing character becomes as important for this text as the magistrate’s job of ascertaining guilt or innocence. 

Austen presaged later novelists by gifting her primary characters complex, evolving psychologies. James does justice to the rakish George Wickham, who is neither more nor less dissolute than when we last met him. But elsewhere, there are problems. Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, who could cut as deeply as a Ginzu knife with a well-placed remark and make us love her even more, has been replaced by James’s dowdy Elizabeth Darcy, who maintains a zombie-like attachment to both prudence and Pemberley. Indeed, the opening scene of the novel, in which Colonel Fitzwilliam, Darcy’s cousin, acknowledges to Elizabeth his aspiration to Georgiana Darcy’s hand, is all about Mrs. Darcy biting her tongue. (The ladies’ book club Greek chorus shouts “Nooooo!” into the unresponsive heavens.)

Darcy is more tolerable. Here James improves on the original. Permitting readers inside Darcy’s proud head in a way that Austen never contrived, James encourages us to understand gentility as it was likely experienced at the time: a complex system of patronage in which benefactors (like Darcy) and dependents (like Wickham) were symbiotically linked. In this way, James returns us to an unfamiliar era when democracy was largely untried and older political forms ordered all ranks of society—forms which depended for their success not on popular vote, but on the character of the individuals invested with power.

To that end, James has created a few new characters. The first is the second contender for Georgiana’s hand, the young lawyer Henry Alveston, a thoroughly modern type who interprets for us the intricacies of early 19th-century British law. The second, Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, the magistrate to whom Darcy turns over the execution of local justice, is by far James’s best addition to Austen’s world. We meet him ensconced in his smoking room reading a tome, not unwillingly disturbed from his quiet, intellectual evening by this local tragedy. To Darcy’s eyes he represents “the embodiment of the law.” As Sir Selwyn’s is the only dialogue to approach Austen’s playful banter it comes as a welcome relief, yet his character is not much developed beyond this point. Colonel Fitzwilliam on the other hand, an original of Austen’s, receives so much development from James that he might as well be brand new.

In a move no doubt intended to spare her audience, James has largely exiled Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh to the margins. Even Lydia gets less airtime than one would expect, considering her husband is on trial for murder. With them has also gone much of the comic intensity of Austen’s universe, leaving no buoyant idiocy to offset the morbidity of the murder mystery and no disgraceful thoughtlessness to relieve the morality of the respectable characters. In Austen’s world, Lydia’s promiscuousness and Lady Catherine de Burgh’s narrow-mindedness make Jane’s chastity and Bingley’s tolerance enviable qualities. In Death Comes to Pemberley, Jane comes off as perfectly vanilla and Bingley as an undiscerning dunderhead who exists simply so that Darcy can tell him to look after the women.

Chawton House: Once the home of Jane Austen's brother, it is now a library dedicated to the study of early English women's writing.
PHOTO: Herry Lawford

Less forgivable is the novel’s almost complete abandonment of those remarkable scenes of formal and informal social gatherings—the dinners, balls, musical evenings, and the like—that gave Austen a chance to pit her characters against each other and see what emerged. In Austen, the best and worst of human nature are revealed in conversation. James seems shy of such moments, preferring to let readers enter the thoughts of individual characters or give us only brief, unsatisfactory, often redundant dialogue. As a result, the plot slows, but doesn’t thicken. If Austen’s characterization is a landscape, full of peaks and valleys, James’s is a vast flatland, monotonous and rather dull.

But perhaps this is too harsh criticism; following in Austen’s footsteps is no easy matter, and after all, the novel of manners is not James’s milieu. Having penned the Adam Dalgliesh series for 50 years now, James is the uncontested queen of contemporary British mystery fiction, and setting a murder mystery in the world of Pride and Prejudice is a true stroke of genius. The mystery genre emerged in the 1840s, only thirty years after Austen’s major work, and in many ways, Austen flirted with its elements. Pride and Prejudice and Emma both turn on secrets that come to light unexpectedly, and Northanger Abbey, a sendup of the 18th-century gothic novel, is all about finding secrets where there are none. Moreover, it makes sense to set a mystery in Austen’s universe precisely because Austen drew the morality of that universe so carefully. Detective fiction—particularly of the kind at which James excels—endures because it both disrupts and reassures: if the criminal is a figure for corruption, the detective is a figure for the satisfying execution of justice.

Sadly, Death Comes to Pemberley steals away that satisfaction. Although Darcy shows early promise as a possible amateur sleuth, no proper detective figure ever emerges from the story. The plot is never twisty enough and the characters never corrupt enough to really disorder the novel’s moral universe. The revelation, in true Austenian fashion, comes by way of a letter that has the disappointing effect of exonerating just about everybody. Consequently, the resolution feels as tepid as the scandal, and the narrative positively limps to a close.

There are bright moments in the novel. Although as a mystery Death Comes to Pemberley may disappoint, as an escape from the absurdity of Austen reflux, it is a welcome addition to bookstore shelves. What the novel really offers, however, is a nostalgic retrospective of Britain on the threshold of industrialization. As such it reminds us—even through its failings—that good character is everything.

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If you are a writer and are interested in writing for Empirical, check out this link to find out how to submit.